Vacation Reading

I'm back from vacation (one that was extended by a volcano in Iceland) and it's time to get back to regular blogging about El Salvador. While I was gone, I hope you had a chance to check out the stories at Linda's El Salvador Blog.

I took a couple of works of fiction along with me on vacation. The first was Do They Know I'm Running? by David Corbett. The book is a crime thriller which takes as its setting the dangerous immigrants pathways between El Salvador and the Latino communities of California. Like Corbett's other book, Blood of Paradise, his new novel steeps itself in the dark underbelly of El Salvador, creating a a page-turning story with many themes you will occasionally see in this blog. Gangs, violence, the Iraq war and a failed immigration policy fill the pages, along with a dose of love and the bonds of family. [Full disclosure -- David is a reader of this blog, and was nice enough to send me a copy of Do They Know I'm Running when it was published recently].


The second book is The She Devil in the Mirror by Horacio Castellanos Moya. Filled with irony and sardonic wit, this modern day tale of the murder of an upper-class socialite, skewers the Salvadoran wealthy class with its high end shopping malls, BMWs, and trips to Miami. As the cover flap to the book states, Castellanos Moya's narrator "paints with frivolous profundity a society in a state of collapse."

I recommend both books to anyone looking for novels of modern day El Salvador.